Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

7LIFETHEY would later call it a Golden Age of hacking, this marvelous existence on the ninth floor ofTech Square. Spending their time in the drab machine room and the cluttered offices nearby,gathered closely around terminals where rows and rows of green characters of code would scrollpast them, marking up printouts with pencils retrieved from shirt pockets, and chatting in theirpeculiar jargon over this infinite loop or that losing subroutine, the cluster of technological monkswho populated the lab was as close to paradise as they would ever be. A benevolently anarchisticlife-style dedicated to productivity and PDP-6 passion. Art, science, an1d play had merged into themagical activity of programming, with every hacker an omnipotent master of the flow ofinformation within the machine. The debugged life in all its glory.But as much as the hackers attempted to live the hacker dream without interference from thepathetically warped systems of the "Real World," it could not be done. Greenblatt and Knight'sfailure to convince outsiders of the natural superiority of the Incompatible Time-sharing Systemwas only one indication that the total immersion of a small group of people into hackerism mightnot bring about change on the massive scale that all the hackers assumed was inevitable. It was truethat, in the decade since the TX-0 was first delivered to MIT, the general public and certainly theother students on campus had become more aware of computers in general. But they did not regardcomputers with the same respect and fascination as did the hackers. And they did not necessarilyregard the hackers' intentions as benign and idealistic.On the contrary, many young people in the late 1960s saw computers as something evil, part of atechnological conspiracy where the rich and powerful used the computer's might against the poorand powerless. This attitude was not limited to students protesting, among other things, the nowexploding Vietnam war (a conflict fought in part by American computers). The machines whichstood at the soul of hackerism were also loathed by millions of common, patriotic citizens who sawcomputers as a dehumanizing factor in society. Every time an inaccurate bill arrived at a home, andthe recipient's attempts to set it right wound up in a frustrating round of calls usually leading to anexplanation that "the computer did it," and only herculean human effort could erase the digital blotthe popular contempt toward computers grew. Hackers, of course, attributed those slipups to thebrain-damaged, bureaucratic, batch-processed mentality of IBM. Didn't people understand that theHacker Ethic would eliminate those abuses by encouraging people to fix bugs like thousand-dollarelectric bills? But in the public mind there was no distinction between the programmers of HulkingGiants and the AI lab denizens of the sleek, interactive PDP-6. And in that public mind all computerprogrammers, hackers or not, were seen either as wild-haired mad scientists plotting the destructionof the world or as pasty-skinned, glassy-eyed automatons, repeating wooden phrases in dullmonotones while planning the next foray into technological big-brotherism.Most hackers chose not to dwell on those impressions. But in 1968 and 1969 the hackers had to facetheir sad public images, like it or not.